After Parmenides: Idealism, Realism, and Epistemic Constructivism

by Tom Rockmore
Chicago, 2021, 197 pages
reviewed by T. Nelson

armenides, the influential pre-Socratic philosopher, believed that ‘being’ is and cannot not be; therefore, he said, ‘being’ is indivisible since change is impossible and what ‘is not’ cannot come into existence. Thinking and being are the same; therefore what cannot be known cannot exist.

According to Tom Rockmore, this was the beginning of the problem of knowledge: the question of whether we can, even in principle, know what is real. The question occupies philosophers to this day. It has wide practical implications: if there is no way to know the real, it is impossible to be certain that scientific theories are evolving toward it.

Kant, perhaps the central figure in this debate, concluded that intuitive knowledge of the real is impossible. Rockmore says Kant's ideas evolved in different editions of Critique of Pure Reason away from representationalism, which says that we directly know only subjective representations, which provide reliable access to the real. Kant's thinking evolved into something that Rockmore calls epistemic construct­ivism. This is often called Kant's Coper­nican Revolution.

Epistemic constructivism is the view that we can never know the real, but only objects that “construct” it. One alternative to this view is called skepticism, which says we can know nothing for certain. This book is a historical account of the attempts by philosophers up to the present to answer these questions. As I see it, it is also the author's attempt to wrench epistemology from its recent descent into post­struc­turalism and restore it to its rightful place as a credible philosophy.

The author's belief is that epistemic constructivism is still the most promising approach, though he concludes (p. 166) “after two and a half millennia of effort, it appears implausible that a persuasive account of knowledge of the real will emerge.”

What science says

The author ignores biology in favor of physics, but biology lends support for the author's point of view. Neuroscience teaches that we do not perceive the world directly, but that our brains construct a model of who we are. We defend our model of self vigorously and even violently if it is challenged. We also construct mental models of objects and other humans, and it is those models we interact with, fall in love with, and bash on Twitter. We seek out stories, behavioral patterns, and other clues to help us build our models, but a model typically bears little resemblance to the actual person.

Our concept of intention, and thus our free will, might also be an illusion, part of the brain's way of building its grand narrative that we are unitary conscious beings with agency and knowable goals.

Because the way we perceive the world is shaped by evolution, there is suspicion that not only our perceptions, but our logic and even our mathe­matics could be influenced by our genetic program­ming. How do we know, for instance, that triangles really have three sides and 2 + 2 equals 4, and that we haven't just been programmed to think so as a prank by misch­ie­vous extra­ter­restrials? We feel certain that those things are obvious, but that certainty too could have been programmed into our brains.

As the great philosopher Donald Rumsfeld might have said, these are unknown unknowns. Maybe they are unknowable unknowables.

dec 28 2021